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President Donald Trump’s wild and unsupported claims of voter fraud have emerged as a high-stakes Republican loyalty test that illustrates the tug of war likely to define the future of the GOP whether he wins or loses the presidency. There is a pervas…
November 7, 2020Read More
President Donald Trump and some of his Republican supporters are testing out a rallying cry for his uphill fight to reverse the lead that Joe Biden holds in key battleground states: count all “legal” votes. The language is freighted with a clear impli…
November 7, 2020Read More
Democrat Joe Biden defeated President Donald Trump to become the 46th president of the United States on Saturday, positioning himself to lead a nation gripped by the historic pandemic and a confluence of economic and social turmoil. Biden crossed 270 …
November 7, 2020Read More
Across the world, many were scratching their heads Friday — especially in countries that have long been advised by Washington on how to run elections — wondering if those assertions could truly be coming from the president of the United States, the nat…
November 7, 2020Read More
Searchers in Guatemala dug through mud and debris looking for an estimated 100 people believed buried by a massive, rain-fueled landslide, as Eta regained tropical storm strength Saturday and churned toward Cuba. The U.S. National Hurricane Center sai…
November 7, 2020Read More
President Donald Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows has been diagnosed with the coronavirus as the nation sets daily records for confirmed cases for the pandemic. Two senior administration officials confirmed Friday that Meadows had tested positive for the virus, which has killed more than 236,000 Americans so far this year. Meadows traveled with Trump in the run-up to Election Day and last appeared in public early Wednesday morning without a mask as Trump falsely declared victory in the vote count.
November 6, 2020Read More
Republican U.S. Sen. David Perdue and Democrat Jon Ossoff will face off in a Jan. 5 runoff in Georgia for Perdue’s Senate seat, one of two high-profile contests in the state that could determine which party controls the upper chamber. Libertarian cand…
November 6, 2020Read More
Joe Biden’s transition team isn’t waiting for a verdict in the presidential race before getting to work. As officials continue to count ballots in several undecided states, longtime Biden aide Ted Kaufman is leading efforts to ensure the former vice p…
November 6, 2020Read More
Before all votes were counted in the states that will determine the next president, conversations within Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s foreign policy orbit had intensified around one person: Tony Blinken.According to multiple sources who spoke to The Daily Beast, Blinken, who served as deputy secretary of state during former President Barack Obama’s second term, is being considered for two influential positions in a potential Biden administration: secretary of state and national security adviser. The talks have occurred more frequently in recent days and weeks as the campaign has neared a tentative close, sources familiar said.The discussions come as Biden campaign officials have insisted that their focus is simply to win the still-ongoing election against President Donald Trump.“He’s up for two jobs,” said a source with knowledge of the conversations, referring to secretary of state and national security adviser. “He’s going to be one or the other.”Blinken has been a central fixture in Bidenworld for decades. He was Biden’s chief foreign policy adviser on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where his geopolitical convictions—and profile as a negotiator—were honed. He then followed Biden to the White House in Obama’s first term, serving as the vice president’s national security adviser. As deputy secretary of state, Blinken was a key figure in selling Congress on the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.While secretary of state remains perhaps the most sought-after prize for which Blinken is a top contender, two sources familiar told The Daily Beast that he is also being reviewed for national security adviser and that Biden’s decision would depend on whether he wants to keep one of his closest political hands nearby in the White House.“Because he’s so close to Biden and has been for years, that kind of relationship usually leads first to national security adviser, then maybe you move over to State,” the source familiar said. “The logic seems pretty strong.”Blinken was the Biden campaign’s premiere foreign policy surrogate and spokesperson during the general election, presenting a Biden agenda as a return to traditionalist multilateralism, particularly on a restoration of the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris climate-change accords. Biden himself has embraced that posture on the trail.“Not a single one of the big challenges we face, whether it’s climate change or mass migration or technological disruption or pandemic disease, can be met by any one country acting alone, even one as powerful as our own,” Blinken told the “Intelligence Matters” podcast last month, echoing a line from Biden’s July 2019 foreign policy speech.Blinken did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A Biden-Harris transition spokesperson said: “The Biden-Harris Transition team is not making any personnel decisions pre-election.”Blinken’s expected nomination for either job will come as little surprise to Biden observers. He was long thought to be one of the likeliest picks for secretary of state. Others up for running Foggy Bottom include Obama’s United Nations ambassador and national security adviser Susan Rice, and the relative longshot Sen. Chris Coons, Biden’s fellow Delawarean. Close friend Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) is also a dark-horse candidate, one source said.Rice, for her part, still stands a chance to be secretary of state, provided the Biden team could convince partisan Senate Republicans to not block her nomination, the source familiar with the discussion said. Conversations about senior positions are expected to escalate among Biden aides and advisers this weekend.Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) interviewed Blinken in September as part of his investigation into Biden, his son Hunter, and Burisma, the Ukranian energy company. Johnson sought testimony from Blinken and other former top Biden advisers in an attempt to glean more information about whether the Obama administration changed policy toward Ukraine because of Hunter’s Burisma board membership. Johnson’s report was inconclusive and only mentioned Blinken twice in passing.While Blinken is deeply associated with Biden, whose foreign policy has often been far too hawkish for the progressives with whom he has promised to work closely, he has made a point of reaching out to a rising branch of dovish policy professionals during the election. Some have taken it as an indication that Biden’s expedited agenda for government work abroad may incorporate some left-leaning priorities.The Biden campaign has been quiet about their transition process since its formation publicly became known. But they have dropped clues, some rather overt, in recent days signaling that they were taking the usual steps associated with a changing of administrations.Earlier this week, officials launched a website landing page meant to vaguely tease the upcoming appointments. As of Friday afternoon, it featured just one paragraph: “The American people will determine who will serve as the next President of the United States,” the text read. “Votes are still being counted in several states around the country. The crises facing the country are severe—from a pandemic to an economic recession, climate change to racial injustice—and the transition team will continue preparing at full speed so that the Biden-Harris Administration can hit the ground running on Day One.”Election 2020: Live ResultsRead more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.
November 6, 2020Read More
(Bloomberg Opinion) — Suddenly, it seems all the world is heading to zero. Just a month after Chinese President Xi Jinping promised to reduce carbon emissions to net zero by 2060, the leaders of Japan and South Korea pledged to hit the same target 10 years sooner. The European Union and U.K. have already put their 2050 pledges into law. In total, countries accounting for about 56% of the world’s emissions have now announced or are investigating targets to eliminate their emissions by mid-century. Who’s next?Looking down the list of the world’s major emitters, you might think we’ve hit a roadblock. Most of those remaining are major exporters of fossil fuels, which you’d expect to be late to the zero-emissions party. Of the main exceptions, India has for decades vocally resisted efforts to cap its ability to pollute until it’s wealthier, and the status of the U.S. is likely to be uncertain until the dust settles on the presidential election.One major economy is in a different place, though: Brazil. Although the country has never promised to zero out its emissions — and is unlikely to do so under its populist president, Jair Bolsonaro — it would find that path far easier than most. Brazil’s first advantage is that its electricity system was largely decarbonized long ago. Thanks to its vast river systems, the country is the most hydro-powered major economy on the planet, with about 64% of electricity generation coming from its dams.(1) Wind, solar and nuclear account for another 21% of the total, leaving fossil fuels with a scant 15%. Even that small slice should be easier to eliminate than in many other countries. Brazil’s ample hydro endowment means it’s unusually well-placed to manage peaks and troughs in electricity demand in a 100% renewable system, and the costs of building new wind farms from scratch are already lower than those of fueling and maintaining existing gas and coal power stations. Dams, like fossil-fired generators (but unlike wind, solar and nuclear), can be switched on and off depending on when they’re needed. Where excess solar generation is available in the middle of the day, they can even pump water uphill to be released again during the evening peak.Industry will also be simpler to zero out. One of the challenges emerging economies face is that development in this sector is uniquely carbon-intensive. On-site emissions from China’s industrial companies alone — not including those associated with electricity consumed by factories and building sites — accounts for about 8% of global fossil pollution. For Brazil, that process has long since played out: Its most intensive industrialization and construction happened in the middle of the 20th century, and as a share of gross domestic product it’s among the lowest in the world, in line with the U.S. and western Europe. Transport, the third big slice of emissions in most countries, is also less of a lift. Unlike emerging economies in Asia which will see millions of people move to cities over the coming decades, Brazil is already one of the most urbanized places on the planet, with a higher share of the population in cities than the U.K., U.S. or South Korea. Public transport is more developed than in most other countries in the Americas, and since the oil crises of the 1970s, the country has been trying to use biofuel from sugarcane to reduce its dependence on petroleum. Such bioethanol currently provides about a third of all road fuel.That’s not a carbon-free option, to be sure — and it’s also failing to provide promised self-sufficiency. In recent years, Brazil has often been a net importer of ethanol, largely from the U.S. Using the country’s huge renewable potential to electrify its passenger vehicle fleet would free up biofuel for export to other countries — and other uses, such as trucking, jet fuel and shipping — that will find substitution away from petroleum harder.It’s in the area of agricultural and quasi-agricultural exports that Brazil has most to gain. The largest slices of its emissions come from just two activities: deforestation and cattle farming.Each of those, though, has significant improvement potential. Brazilian beef is some of the most carbon-intensive on the planet. Each kilogram of Brazilian cattle raised on newly deforested land adds as much as 726 kilograms (1,600 pounds) of carbon-equivalent emissions to the atmosphere, according to one 2011 study. In more established parts of the country, it requires only around 22 kilograms of CO2, and farms in other countries require half of that, with some figures running as low as 3 kilograms.That’s largely a result of Brazilian ranching’s low productivity. Often lacking the intensive feeding systems that get cattle in other parts of the world to prime weight in one or two years, your average Brazilian cow has burped up a lot more methane by the time it reaches the slaughterhouse. Grass-fed beef also requires a lot more land than grain-fed intensive cattle, especially when the latter are used for dairy production, too.Encouraging the ongoing trend toward intensification of cattle farming would also have a dramatic impact on deforestation. Brazil’s emissions shrank by a remarkable 39% in just five years between 2005 and 2010, almost entirely as a result of an 80% reduction in deforestation under the administration of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. That had already started to reverse under new forest laws introduced well before Bolsonaro’s election in 2018, but it’s an example of what’s possible with the right incentives for land preservation. Just allowing formerly logged Brazilian forests to continue naturally regenerating could fix around 22 billion metric tons of CO2, according to one 2016 study — roughly enough to absorb the country’s own emissions for half a century. A better idea, though, would be to turn Brazil’s ample forest land endowment into a new export industry. A growing group of countries making pledges to hit “net zero” aren’t yet clear about where the gross emissions in excess of the net figure are going to be offset. Brazilian trees could offer just the solution. At a $50 per metric ton carbon price, restoring just 1% of the country’s 126 million hectares of cultivated pasture each year could fix 150 million metric tons of CO2 and represent a more valuable export industry than beef.Such a change isn’t going to happen under the slash-and-burn policies of Bolsonaro. Brazil’s opposition is currently bitterly divided ahead of 2022 presidential elections, and poor forest management is often a bipartisan issue — da Silva’s left-wing successor Dilma Rousseff bears as much responsibility for the return to deforestation as Bolsonaro. Still, as my colleague Clara Ferreira Marques has written, self-interested reasons are still the best way to get Brazil to join the group of net-zero countries. Its failure to protect its forests has put the free trade agreement between the European Union and South America’s Mercosur bloc on ice. Bolsonaro ultimately hasn’t followed through on a campaign threat to pull Brazil out of the Paris Agreement, and the powerful agribusiness bloc in congress can be surprisingly pragmatic on such issues. Momentum on climate could be the catalyst to move forward on trade, while an early seat at the table would give Brasilia the chance to help craft global climate agreements to maximize its own economic benefit from decarbonization.Brazil could be a major winner from the world going to zero on carbon. It’s high time it seized that opportunity.(1) Hydropower dams can emit significant amounts of greenhouse gases as plant matter decomposes, but these are concentrated in the early years after construction and the bulk of Brazil’s hydro plants were built in the 1970s and 1980s. With a crop of new dams built in the 2000s and 2010s now in operation, the pipeline of new projects represents only a few percent of the existing installed base.This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.David Fickling is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering commodities, as well as industrial and consumer companies. He has been a reporter for Bloomberg News, Dow Jones, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times and the Guardian.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinionSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.
November 6, 2020Read More
The slow pace of this year’s U.S. election count is fueling a lot of criticism, but it’s mostly a reflection of laudable things: greater voter enthusiasm and steps that states took to protect their residents from COVID-19. Meanwhile, Democrat Joe Bide…
November 6, 2020Read More
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